Mozilla's Firefox Turns Five

Firefox celebrated a milestone birthday Monday: Five years ago today, Mozilla shipped version 1.0 of the open-source browser.

Firefox was unveiled "with belief that, as the most significant social and technological development of our time, the Internet is a public resource that must remain open and accessible to all," Mozilla's Melissa Shapiro wrote in a blog post.

Mozilla logged one million downloads in the first four days of Firefox 1.0. On July 31 of this year, the company hit its one billionth download worldwide.

Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 in June 2008, and the browser garnered 8 million downloads in 24 hours. Firefox 3.5 hit the Web in June.

Christopher Blizzard, an open-source evangelist with Mozilla, pointed to several trends that have changed the face of the browser over the last five years, including the rise of a modern browser built for the future of Web apps, the movement of standards to the forefront of development, the ability to customize your Web experience with add-ons, RSS and data, video, the user as the creator, and mobile.

But what's next for Firefox and the browser?

Blizzard said that Mozilla and Firefox have paved the way for other browsers like Safari and Google's Chrome.

"We've managed to keep Microsoft honest and forced them to release newer versions of their browsers," he wrote. "Firefox's presence was a large factor in Apple being able to ship a browser to its user base as the Mac came back to the market. We've made it possible for third party browser vendors like Google to enter the market."

Blizzard predicted that, in the next five years, issues around data, privacy, and identity will feature prominently. Users should also look for changes in video "as web developers make individual choices to support a standards-based, royalty-free approach."

In the mobile space, meanwhile, "the decisions of users, carriers, governments and the people who build phones will have far-reaching effects on this new extension to the Internet and how people will access information for decades to come," Blizzard said.